I wanted to wrap my home garage with wall vinyl. I emailed our ND rep and told them it was a personal sale and not one to the company and what it was for (I had to pay via cc and not put it on acct, only reason I mentioned it
They sent me a quote... Said since it's personal they'll do it for cost. Wrote "special quote, one time price for personal project - $260"
I thought that was nice of them! I wanted to see how much of a discount they gave me... So I logged into grimco to see what they charge. $220. I emailed the rep because we have a good relationship... Showed him the pricing and asked if $260 is really their "cost". He of course offered to match grimcos price I told him I don't like jumping through hoops to get pricing so nevermind. That was my last straw with ND.
I don't mind if they're not the cheapest. We always threw them some orders, even if it cost more..because they often had stuff in stock locally that grimco didn't, or they'd 2 day anything another branch had to us for free. They've been getting less and less of our orders though. I like the convenience of grimco, and while I'm sure if we negotiated with our rep we would get better pricing then grimco with the volume we do... But like you said, when he's on vacation it'll be a pain to get that pricing for the new guy